BlackBerry outage fixed

BlackBerry says its technical team has identified the potential cause of the issue and has reduced its impact on customers’ service.

BlackBerry says it has resolved the problems that left customers without access to email and messaging outage for up to five hours.

"BlackBerry can confirm that all service issues impacting some users in Canada and the Asia Pacific region have been resolved. Thank you for your patience,” Lisette Kwong, senior manager of corporate communications, wrote in an email to CBC News shortly before 3 p.m.

BlackBerry confirmed shortly after noon ET — about three hours after the problems began — that the service issue was affecting users in those two regions.

"Our technical team has identified the potential cause of the issue and has reduced its impact on customers’ service," Kwong wrote at the time.

According to the website Canadianoutages.com, where smartphone users can report problems, the issues began around 9 a.m. ET today. The outage did not affect users of BlackBerry 10 devices.

Customers of different carriers in several provinces, including Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, B.C. and Nova Scotia reported the problems.